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Now, before you say this is another one of those blog entries that say the author’s spirit/heart is broken and it needs mending/healing, I’ll tell you otherwise. The title refers to the things around me. Yes. The TV. The PC. And stuff. Things. My soul and my heart are fine. Thank you for the concern. I’m now dealing with the frustration of having stuff around me not working properly.

The first one to give out is my TV. It happened during one of the recent thunderstorms. I love the weather. Cold. Wet. Mildly depressing. Perfect for staying in and sleeping the hours away, or going out to have a few (okay, a lot of) alcoholic beverages with friends. But I hated the stormy weather when it caused these stupid electrical surges that made my TV go kaput. I have to slam it a few times before it works. Most of the time, it just gives me a white line across the screen and some audio. It’s not fun to catch lingerie shows on FTV with only the audio on.

Our family PC also went haywire, but not because of the weather. Or maybe it was. I’m not sure. All I know is it just stopped working. It was an old system. We have DSL, but most of the time, it worked like dial-up. It was probably nature’s (or technology’s?) way of telling us to get a new computer. And we did. Yesterday, I spent almost the whole day on setting up this new PC complete with a new LCD monitor, an 80 GB hard drive, 512 RAM, and a Pentium 4 processor. I had to bear hearing Christy Fermin’s voice while she’s on The Buzz (don’t ask) while I was installing a million things on this new PC. Hello, better and faster computing. Goodbye, old files. Sigh.

One other broken thing is yUPieLBi.com. I’m very frustrated with the website right now. With its first few months, all I had to contend with is the fact that I had to use my programming skills (hahaha!) to make the simplest of changes. But recently, due to high traffic and very busy site activity, I’ve encountered bandwidth and server issues almost weekly. The site suffered a couple of downtimes before I finally decided to rebuild it from scratch. It’s now temporarily dead. The site is a community site so even though I’m not being paid for putting it up (I’m actually the one putting out dough to keep it up), I’m obliged to bring it back and make sure it stays online because a lot of people feel the atmosphere of UPLB in yUPieLBi.com. And we eLBizens love our UPLB.

With all of these broken things around me, I get frustrated, yes. But not depressed. I’m okay with my TV being replaced by an old one (it flickers like hell and it’s in constant “sepia mode”) that was just lying around in my old room, but I hope it’s temporary. I’m very happy with the new family PC, eventhough I lost some of my files and bookmarks from the old one (good thing I have some of them backed up in the PC in my room). And I’m very optimistic that yUPieLBi.com will live again, hopefully in the near future.

Being broken is temporary. Broken things can be replaced, upgraded, and even completely torn down to be rebuilt again better than before. Can’t do that with your heart and your soul. Well, technically, with your heart, you can. But I’m going out of context here so I’ll just go back to work on yUPieLBi.com now.